Golf and bad restaurant seating give me the bell-bottom blues

Publish Date:

Aug 21, 2014

By Rick Fairless

Dear Grandma and Grandpa,

I hope y’all are good up there in Heaven. We are burning up down here in Texas. Well, maybe not “burning up,” but it’s dang hot! It’s funny, because people all over the world always talk about the weather, good or bad. Here in Dallas, we can ride year-round.

I actually rode on New Year’s Eve 1999, and I was riding my 1982 FXE Shovel when the millennium arrived. I wanted to be able to tell my grandkids that when the clock struck midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, I was riding my motorcycle! Remember, some people were saying the computers were all gonna shut down and there would be a run on all the banks. Some even predicted the world would end. Yeah, well, thank God none of that happened, but I did have a bad headache that next morning.

Hey, Grandpa, I don’t know if I ever told y’all, but I actually started a new hobby a few years ago that has nothing to do with motorcycles. Believe it or not, it’s golf. Yep, I’m a golfer and I really, really enjoy the game. I try to play about once a week, early in the morning. I can normally play in less than three hours.

I have to tee off at sunrise, ahead of everybody else, so that I don’t have to wait on some goobers in front of me. So when I do play, my schedule goes like this: I’ll come to work at 2 a.m., get all my paperwork done and head to the golf course at 5 a.m. This time of year I can tee off at 6 a.m. and I’m back at work before we open at 9 a.m.

I think I enjoy golf because it allows me to escape, if only for a few hours, and focus on something besides my business, even though it’s only a short time. A three-hour round of golf to me is like a weekend off!

When I play golf, I don’t wear typical golf clothes … unless the golf course makes me. Most of the courses around Dallas-Fort Worth know me, and they let me wear my normal blue jeans and a Strokers tie-dyed T-shirt and boots. Sometimes, if they don’t know me, they make me wear them goofy golf clothes, but as soon as I get out of sight of the clubhouse, I change back to my street clothes. I don’t like to be censored and I don’t think I have to look like all them other golfers wearing their disco outfits.